This is a preview of Right Richter, our newsletter about the extreme right wing. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox, sign up for it here. It’s hard to stress how much effort the pro-Trump media has devoted over the last year-and-half to John Durham. The top federal prosecutor in Connecticut with a bushy, meme-ready goatee, Durham was appointed by Bill Barr in May 2019 to investigate the origins of the 2016 Russia probe. Or, in other words, to try to make something of what the president hears every night on Sean Hannity’s show. Durham’s much-awaited report was supposed to […]
Justice Department
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America’s 19th-richest family, the Sackler clan, made unfathomable riches by flooding the globe with OxyContin, sparking an opioid-addiction crisis that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. They now look set to keep the vast majority of their estimated $13 billion fortune if a controversial settlement, supported by the judge presiding over a key bankruptcy trial, is accepted by a Trump White House reportedly keen to declare some form of “victory” over Big Pharma before the election. The New Yorker reports the Sacklers, who own Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, have said they will pay out a guaranteed $3 billion to […]
William Barr does not seem concerned that people know he is unethical, but he treasures his reputation as a ruthlessly effective fixer for Donald Trump. As the events of recent weeks have made plain, however, that reputation is undeserved. When Trump nominated Barr to serve as attorney general in 2018, many expressed hope that this “old Washington hand” would return respect for the rule of law to the Department of Justice. Barr swiftly burst that balloon by baldly lying about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings, even as he hid them for weeks. Since then, Barr has thoroughly trashed his reputation for […]
The same day that Attorney General William Barr insisted there is “no pattern” of him working to advance the personal interests of President Donald Trump, several sources cited by The New York Times said one of his first moves after being sworn into office in early 2019 was trying to find ways to undermine the conviction of longtime Trump fixer Michael Cohen. Barr had reportedly repeatedly questioned prosecutors over the charges against Cohen, who pleaded guilty in August 2018 to financial crimes that included hush-money payments to women who alleged they had affairs with Trump. He went so far as to […]
As activists across the United States have united behind the slogan “defund the police,” with some using that to mean shifting a share of funding to social services while others call for the elimination of policing altogether, a new study points to the danger of an abrupt or haphazard withdrawal of policing. In a working paper released this month by Harvard economist Roland Freyer and researcher Tanaya Devi, the pair found that in five major cities where deaths of African-Americans in police-involved incidents went viral and state and federal authorities subsequently placed police departments under investigation, homicides and other forms of […]
“So they’re going to get away with it?” my wife asked me recently with a mix of anger and resignation in her voice. “Whatever happened to that story? It just disappeared.” “They” are the U.S. border patrol agents, guards and supervisors who manage–or who have managed in recent years–those notorious U.S. government-funded detention facilities that house migrant and refugee children. They take custody of these children, often having separated them from their parents. So they act in loco parentis (in place of parents), and assume responsibility for the welfare of these minors. “It” are the more than 4,500 complaints about alleged […]
Gustavo Alzate, a 34-year-old property manager for a New York real estate firm, was desperate after federal agents brought him in chains to a New Jersey jail to await a hearing on deportation charges. The Colombian immigrant used a jailhouse hotline to call in every day to the New York immigration court to find out when he would get a hearing before a judge. “For a long time, I was told there was no record of my case or me with the court,” he later said in court papers. “No one ever told me when my Notice to Appear form was […]
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr announced on Sunday that he has asked the Department of Justice to investigate the handling of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man who was fatally shot by two white men while jogging. “We are committed to a complete and transparent review of how the Ahmaud Arbery case was handled from the outset,” Carr said in a statement. “The family, the community and the state of Georgia deserve answers, and we will work with others in law enforcement at the state and federal level to find those answers.” Also on Sunday, the Georgia Bureau […]